Facebook Blames Technical Issue For Translating Chinese Leader's Name To "Mr. Sh*thole"

Facebook apologized Saturday for posts in which Chinese leader Xi Jinping's appeared as "Mr. Shithole," when translated from Burmese to English. The company blamed a "technical issue" found in the website's Burmese dictionary

Reports of the mistranslation came to light during Xi Jinping's recent visit to Myanmar. In addition to signing a massive infrastructure deal with the Chinese leader, Myanmar State Counsellor Aung San Suu Kyi posted a statement about the visit to Facebook. When translated to English, the post featured numerous references to "Mr. Shithole."

Umm. Facebook seems to be translating “Xi Jinping” written in Burmese as “Mr Shithole”.

This is a post on Aung San Suu Kyi’s official page, recounting her meeting with him yesterday… h/t @felizysolo

”kingdom of Mr Shithole” pic.twitter.com/B4V2cYjPJw

— Poppy McPherson (@poppymcp) January 18, 2020

"We fixed a technical issue that caused incorrect translations from Burmese to English on Facebook," said Facebook in a statement to Reuters. "This should not have happened and we are taking steps to ensure it doesn’t happen again. We sincerely apologize for the offense this has caused."

According to the statement, Facebook claims that President Xi's name did not appear in the site's Burmese database, so the system guessed an equivalent based on other words that start with "xi" and "shi." Kenneth Wong, a Burmese language instructor at the University of California in Berkley, California, explained to the New York Times that, in Burmese, Xi's name sounds similar to "chi kyin phyin," which translates to "feces hole buttocks."

As Reuters points out, Facebook has had issues translating Burmese in the past. In 2017, Facebook translated a posted advocating for the genocide of Muslims to "I shouldn’t have a rainbow in Myanmar."

This "technical issue" comes at a crucial time for Facebook, which has been pouring resources into its Chinese advertising business. In January, the company announced that it would establish an engineering team in Singapore to focus more closely on Chinese advertising customers.

Despite being blocked in mainland China, Facebook is still available in Hong Kong. In 2018, the company generated more than $5 billion in revenue from Chinese advertising.